Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Mapping New York's Citi Bike Scheme

My guess is that the most mapped data in the world over the last couple of months has been from New York's new Citi Bike scheme. Here's a little round-up of some of the maps created so far.

Let's start with the official Citi Bike Stations map.
The Citi Bike Google Map shows the location of all the city's bike
stations. If you select a station's map marker you can find out how many
bikes are currently available and how many docking stations are free.

That's about it for this map, although the map does show planned bike stations, using yellow map markers. So you can at least see if a station is likely to open anywhere near you in the near future.

The CASA Global Bike Share Map is one of the better bike share maps. The map (using OpenStreetMap map tiles) allows users to mouse-over bike stations and view how many bikes and empty docking spaces are available. The markers are also color-coded to show at a glance which stations are more empty and which are more full.

The Global Bike Share Map includes an interesting feature that allows the user to animate through the last few days of activity at each bike station. It is fascinating to watch the bike station activity pick-up and die down through rush hour periods and through the night.

The Global Bike Share Map has the added bonus that you can view the same visualisations for many other city bike sharing schemes around the world.

The WNYC Bike Share Map doesn't do anything amazing. You can click on each station's marker and view how many bikes and how many empty docks are available. However I have to include it here because it uses the Google Maps API new map style - so it does look beautifully clean and fresh.

The Atlantic Wire has a near real-time Google Map that updates with the latest activity at all the city's bike stations. A few times a minute, the map checks the Citibike database and drops a marker on the map where there has been some activity.

Messages are also added below the map that report which stations have just seen a bike returned or borrowed.

If you
want to join the biking crowd then you should check out this map of
routes and tips to cycling in New York.

The New York Times' Your Biking Wisdom in Ten Words
is a handy reader's guide to biking in the Big Apple. The map includes
readers' tips on good and bad biking locations and a number of popular
cycling routes, care of Strava users.

If all these Citi Bike maps have got you inspired you should get along to the City Bike Civic Hack Night on Wednesday June 26th. You should also check-out Citi Bike Stats, which has a lot of interesting graphs and charts using data from the Citi Bike scheme. There are no maps but there is a lot of lovely data.